All that is Solid … is a radical blog that seeks to promote a future beyond capital's social universe. "All that is solid melts into air" (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 'The Communist Manifesto', 1848).

In recent decades, a wealth of information has been produced about academic labour: the financialisation of knowledge, diminution of professional autonomy and collegiality through managerialism and audit cultures; the subsumption of higher education into circulations of capital, proletarianisation of intellectual work, shift from dreams of enlightenment and emancipation to imperatives of ‘employability’, and experiences of alienation and anger amongst educators across the world.

This has also been a period of intensifying awareness about the significance of these processes, not only for teachers and students in universities, but for all labour and intellectual, social and political life as well. And now we watch the growth of a transnational movements that is inventing new ways of knowing and producing knowledge, new forms of education, and new possibilities for pedagogy to play a progressive role in struggles for alterantives within the academy and beyond.

Yet within the academy, the proliferation of critical work on these issues is not always accompanied by qualitative changes in everyday practice. The conditions of academic labour for many in the UK are indeed becoming more precarious and repressive – and in unequal measure across institutions and disciplines, and in patterns that retrench existing inequalities of gender, physical ability, class, race and sexuality. The critical analysis of academic labour promises much, but often remains disconnected from the ways we work in practice with others.

This conference brings together scholars and activists from a range of disciplines to discuss these problems, and to consider how critical knowledge about new forms of academic labour can be linked to struggles to humanise labour and knowledge production within and beyond the university.

Contributions from:

Mette Louise Berg

Rob Coley

Anna Curcio

Richard Hall

Maria Do Mar Pereira

Dean Lockwood

Andrew McGettigan

Justine Mercer

Sara Motta

Adam O’Meara

Gigi Roggero

Howard Stevenson

Public / Free / Open

This conference is public, free and open to everyone. Please register so we know how many people will be attending. If you have any questions about the event, please contact Dr. Sarah Amsler at samsler@lincoln.ac.uk.

Getting here

Doing and Undoing Academic Labour will be held in Learning Landscapes, MB1019, the University of Lincoln. Click here for a map of the site.